Three Men Dug Out of Alcatraz With Sharpened Spoons and Were Never Seen Again
Three federal arrest warrants have stayed open since June 1962, set to run until the men they name would turn one hundred. The men are Frank Morris and the brothers John and Clarence Anglin. They walked out of Alcatraz — the prison the federal government built precisely so that no one could leave it — on the night of June 11, 1962, pushed a homemade raft into San Francisco Bay, and were never seen again.
It is the more famous of the two Alcatraz escapes the Rock never accounted for. The FBI worked the case for seventeen years and concluded the men most likely drowned. No bodies were ever recovered. To reach that night you have to start with how three convicts in the most secure prison in the country reached open water at all.
The Morning the Count Broke
The first thing the guards found were the heads.
At the seven o’clock count on the morning of June 12, a guard reached through the bars of Clarence Anglin’s cell to wake him, and a dummy head rolled off the pillow onto the floor. Down the row were two more like it, propped in the bunks with blankets pulled up: heads made of soap and toilet paper, painted to a skin tone and finished with human hair swept up from the prison barbershop floor. All through the night, guards making their counts had looked into Cell 138 and seen Frank Morris asleep. They had seen one of these.
The alarm went up across the bay. The Coast Guard, the FBI, and the prison launched an extensive air, sea, and land search that ran for ten days. What the water gave back was thin and ambiguous. A homemade paddle floated up off Angel Island. A life vest washed ashore on Cronkhite Beach; another turned up near the island. Workers found a wallet wrapped in plastic, carrying the names and photographs of the Anglins’ friends and relatives. No bodies.
Behind the empty cells, a hole led into a part of the prison the guards had not known the inmates could reach.
The Rock and the Men It Held
Alcatraz sat on a wind-scoured island in San Francisco Bay, a mile and a quarter of cold, fast water from the city. The Bureau of Prisons opened it in 1934 as the place it sent the men no other prison could hold — Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, the incorrigibles and the escape artists. The water was the wall. Currents ran hard around the island, the temperature hovered in the low fifties even in summer, and the official line was that the bay finished anyone the cell house didn’t.
Frank Morris arrived in January 1960 as inmate AZ1441. Orphaned at eleven, he had moved through foster homes and reform schools into a career of armed robbery and narcotics, and he had already broken out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary once. His tested IQ was 133 — the top two percent. He landed in Cell 138 on the outside row of B Block.
The Anglin brothers came next. John and Clarence had grown up in a family of Georgia farm laborers who followed the harvests north, and as boys they swam in water cold enough to have ice still floating on it. They robbed an Alabama bank in 1958, drew thirty-five-year sentences, and bounced through the federal system trying to escape until the Bureau sent them to the one prison built to stop that. They drew cells near Morris’s. A fourth man, Allen West, was in the cell next to Morris — a car thief who knew John Anglin from a Florida penitentiary, and who later claimed the whole plan had been his.
Behind the Wall
The weakness was a six-by-nine-inch ventilation grille at the back of each cell, low down beside the sink. Behind the grille was the cell wall — and behind that wall ran an unguarded utility corridor full of pipes, three stories tall, that the inmates were never meant to reach.
The concrete around the grilles had decayed in the salt air. The men went at it with spoons taken from the mess hall, with discarded saw blades found around the grounds, and with a drill they built from the motor of a broken vacuum cleaner. The drill was loud, so they ran it during the music hour, when Morris practiced his accordion and the noise of digging vanished into it. They worked the holes wider month by month, and they hid the damage behind false grilles and painted cardboard panels that passed a guard’s glance.
When a man could fit through, the corridor opened the prison up. They climbed the pipes to the top of the cellblock, to a vacant level no one used, and built a workshop in the dark above the cells. There they made what they needed to cross the bay.
The raft came from more than fifty raincoats — their own, others donated or stolen — cut up and cemented at the seams with the heat of nearby steam pipes, sealed with plastic from the shops, and stitched by hand into a craft six feet by fourteen. They built life vests on the same principle, working from instructions in the March 1962 issue of Popular Mechanics. They cut paddles from plywood. They converted a stolen concertina into a bellows to inflate the raft. And the Anglins built the heads — nicknamed things like “Oink” and “Oscar,” three to lie in the beds and a fourth meant for West — to buy the hours between lights-out and the morning count.
The Night
On the night of June 11, after the 9:30 lights-out, Morris and the Anglins pushed through their vents, set the dummy heads in their bunks, and climbed into the corridor for the last time. They went up the pipes, out through a ventilator on the roof, and down a fifty-foot kitchen vent pipe to the ground. They crossed the grounds to the northeast shore, climbed two twelve-foot perimeter fences topped with barbed wire, and reached the water near the power plant, in a blind spot between the searchlights.
Allen West did not make it. He had reinforced the concrete around his own grille earlier in the plan, and when the night came the cement had set too hard. By the time he finally broke through, the others were gone. He climbed back into his cell and waited for morning, and when the guards came he told them everything.
The three who got out inflated the raft, pushed off into the dark bay sometime around ten, and disappeared.
The Open File
The FBI worked the case for seventeen years and closed its file on the last day of 1979, concluding that the men had most likely drowned in the cold and the current. The U.S. Marshals Service took over the file and kept the warrants open. Over the decades the questions refused to settle: a 2013 letter to the San Francisco police, signed by a man claiming to be John Anglin, said Morris and Clarence had since died and offered a surrender in exchange for medical care and a promise of no more than a year in jail; a photograph surfaced that the Anglin family said showed the brothers alive in Brazil in 1975. Neither could be proven, and neither could be dismissed.
The men would be deep into their nineties now, if not past. Each warrant runs until the man it names would turn one hundred — the last of them in 2031. Until then, three inmates of the prison that no one escaped remain, officially, at large.